The Fires (15 page)

There was a charmed part of me it would never touch, because unlike
most people, I hadn’t learned to fear it. You heard mothers hiss Hot! to
their babies when they crawled near a stove or an iron, but I must have
confused this warning with all the others. This was one way I had to
escape the guilt—a heavy door that opened to a small, cool cell with
bookshelves and then locked behind me.

I
waited in the sewing room while my mother finished talking to Marietta on the phone. She was making a dress for me, and she’d asked me to come to the house for a fitting. There was only one window, its blue gingham curtains drawn above piles of fabric, a box of old patterns, round tins of buttons and thread, a pair of scissors. The sewing machine sat on a table pushed against the wall, its needle lifted, poised and expectant.

Pattern pieces crinkled in the draft when she opened the door.

“Why don’t you take those off?” she said, nodding to my skirt and blouse. She held up the bottom of the gray dress. “Here’s the skirt. I want to measure how long to make it.”

I went into the bathroom, took off my clothes, and pulled the gathered fabric to my waistline, then went back into the sewing THE FIRES / 113

room. She rested her wrapped-up ankle on a chair as she bent to fiddle with the gathers. “You’re getting thinner,” she said, holding the fabric against my body expertly. She rarely touched me, and so her soft hands startled me each time she took my measure-ments.

She belted the tape measure around my waist, then glared down at the markings. I felt the pad of her finger in the small of my back. “Almost twenty-three and a half,” she said. “I’ll have to take this up a little. Let me measure for the bodice while I’ve got you here.” She ran the tape measure from my waist to my shoulder, then wrapped it around my ribs, just below my bra, over the pink terrain of scars. “Stay right there,” she said. She sighed and studied where each of the seams should be, whisper-ing to herself, “Oh, here,” and then moving around to my back, placed a cool finger against my neck and murmured, “there.”

I stared at the austere cross that hung over the door. The hard, plain geometry of it reminded me of a plumb line, some kind of tool. In my mind, I automatically replaced the suffering face and wasted body, the nailed feet and hands. Without these the cross seemed too efficient, as if we couldn’t afford to think about Good Friday, only Easter.

My mother was on her knees, pinning the hem. “Grandma and Erma spent all day yesterday picking out a new wallpaper for the kitchen. They got rid of those awful brown pears.” Her worn hands neatly turned the frayed edges of the material. “Staying busy, I guess.”

The words seem to shoot from a tiny hard spot between my eyes. “Is that what you did after the fire? Stay busy?”

She pinched up another section of fabric, turned me a little.

Her thin arms were working fast. “What?” I knew she knew what I meant. She stopped pinning and looked down at my shoe.

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“There was a lot to do,” she said in a flat voice. I looked down at the top of her head, the gray hairs dulling the brown. Something prickled in my chest.

“Salt baths,” I said.

Her voice flickered. “Yes. We had to give you those.” She began pinning the hem again. I could hardly bear to think of them and wondered why I couldn’t remember what must have been more painful than anything I’d ever felt since. Sometimes I thought the numbness began with those salt baths. When she’d finished pinning the hem, she sat back and studied the evenness of it. She looked girlish and frail, kneeling there on the floor.

“That was a strange dinner Sunday,” I said.

She looked up from under a gray strand of hair. “It was, sort of.”

“Did you go to those Klan rallies with Grandma? Did Hanna?”

She stood up and went over to the table where the pattern was and looked down at a diagram, placed her finger on it. “Oh, that wasn’t the
Klan,
” she said, making a tsking sound. “My father always said you couldn’t make him put on one of those ghost costumes, even if it was Halloween.”

“Didn’t you see the pictures?”

She squinted to read and looked away. “Of course I saw them, and I’d seen them before, but it wasn’t the same thing. It was just an old-fashioned ladies’ auxiliary, Mother told me. They had quilting bees and bake sales. Same crowd as the Rebekah Lodge.”

“You believe that?”

“Of course.” She came over and knelt in front of me again, put a pin in her mouth, and said through clenched teeth, “Put your arms up.”

She shied away from saying anything critical of her parents, even if it was obvious (like her mother’s vanity, which must have sometimes wounded her). Their frailties seemed to panic her—

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she got this look on her face as if she were being chased. “Did you see Mr. Schultz again?” she said finally. “He’s such a nice person. He told me he was worried about you, working all alone at the hotel.” There it was again.

“I’m not alone. There’s a security guard now.”

She pinched a few straight pins from the table and laid them in the palm of her hand. “I never liked that place.”

“It’s a perfectly good hotel.” With something like a razor, I cut away the memory of the men’s hands, though I thought she could see this, or anyway suspected what I was doing. “Didn’t Grandpa and Grandma stay there after they got married?”

“That was before. Aunt Emily stayed there on one of her window escapades, and they wanted us to pay for it.”

“Really? For the windows or the room?”

She sighed. “The room.” She slipped a couple of pins into the red pincushion tied to her wrist. “Oscar paid for it in the end, as always. Hanna was running over there to see her every day, and we didn’t even know about it.”

One of the pins in the bodice pricked my stomach. This was what really bothered her: Hanna going to Emily without her, Hanna doing what she didn’t have the courage to do herself, Hanna the prettier one.

“Well, that wasn’t the hotel’s fault,” I said. My great-aunt Emily’s mind was going, Marietta said, and she didn’t like to have visitors, so even though I thought she might have heard from Hanna, I’d dismissed the idea of going to her for help. But that was when I still hoped my mother or Marietta would give in to the pressure of our lie and decide to help me find her.

“Nonetheless…” My mother’s ruby ring sparked in the window light. Her skin was a bluish color, her wrist thin and knobby.

“Have you eaten yet?” I asked her. She looked so vulnerable 116 / RENÉ STEINKE

and thin. It was as if her dead father were pulling her flesh to some other place, wherever he was.

“Of course.” She stood up and adjusted the collar where it was basted at my neck. “Tuna-fish sandwich. Now, take this off, but be careful not to rip any of the stitches.”

VIII

E
mily’s house in Plymouth was pink with green shutters. A plastic canary that Marietta would have said looked cheap perched on top of the mailbox. When I explained who I was to the nurse in the blue uniform who answered the door, her voice took on a canned sweetness, and she ushered me into a sunlit and dusty room with an orange velvet couch worn sheeny. Emily sat with her hands on the wheels of her chair near the window in the sun.

“Emily,” said the nurse, testing the unstable surface of her,

“Ella, your niece is here.”

As she turned toward us, the end of a white lace scarf around her neck twisted under her arm. “Ella?”

“Catherine’s daughter,” I said, taking a few steps closer to her.

“I haven’t seen you since the Kestler reunion.” She craned her head to look behind me at the track I’d made on the wood floor, and I glanced back, thinking there must have been mud on my shoes, but the floor was clean.

“Yes,” she said finally. “You were born just before Robert, Earl’s son.”

I nodded, but didn’t know who she was talking about.

“You’re the swimmer, aren’t you?”

117

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I nodded, though of course I wasn’t. I’d never even owned a bathing suit. “Used to be.”

She had intense, bright-blue eyes, but her gaze wandered in and out of focus, alternately alert and bored, like sunlight clouds were blowing through. When I took another step closer to her, wavering over whether or not I should hug her, she drew back and patted the windowsill with her palm, precisely, as if she were keeping beat with a record. “Have to make sure it’s still there.”

She clicked her tongue. “Catherine’s daughter all grown up.” She said it as if imitating a grandmotherly voice she’d heard somewhere. She held out a small hand powdered with freckles, and I took it, squeezed it, and kissed her lightly on the cheek. “It’s so nice of you to visit,” she said in that strange voice.

I sat down on the limp, fleshy couch cushions. “Marietta says hello.”

She tilted her head, but her tight gray curls didn’t move at all.

“Is she well?”

“Yes, she is,” I said, a little too brightly, “considering…I mean she’s still spending a lot of time alone.” I thought of Marietta circling the birds in the feeder behind her house, trying to get a particular yellow-and-black jay, of her putting on lipstick in the mirror, looking longingly at the reflection, trying to fish up a younger version of herself. “She’s keeping busy, though.”
We’re
all busy,
I thought,
busy as ants in a trampled hill.

She nodded. “I was so sick myself I couldn’t get out of bed that day, or I would have been there. He was never healthy, that man.

Don’t know what he would have done if she hadn’t taken care of him. Always going to bed, it seemed like, saying he didn’t feel well when it looked like nothing was wrong with him.” Her eyes glinted. I wondered if she suspected the truth. “My mother says hello, too,” I said.

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“Oh, how is Catherine?”

Starving,
I thought. “She broke her ankle last month,” I said.

“Nothing serious, but she’s having trouble keeping her mind on things. It was so unexpected.”

“Terrible thing, losing your father,” she said, twisting the white scarf in her lap. “You know that, sweetie,” she said, and it surprised me that she remembered this. “Your father was a fine man,” she said, sitting up straighter. “Talented. I liked to hear him play at Grace Church. It was magnificent.”

He used to sit in his black church coat up in the choir loft, and sometimes during the service I saw him fold and unfold his sheet music, as if each time he smoothed it out, it would contain some new secret.

Emily’s gaze turned suddenly distant, and she methodically touched the wheel of her chair with the ball of her hand. I watched her lips move, counting. In that precise afternoon brightness her palm ticked against the wheel, and a shadow slanted on the floor.

If only I could get her to rummage around in her memory, I’d find out where to look for Hanna. “We had dinner at the Housemans’ last week. Do you know them?”

“Erma,” she said, nodding. “Marietta’s friend. Has a whiny voice.”

“She showed us pictures of them when they were young.”

Emily smiled and nodded. “You see me, too?”

“No. At least I don’t think so. They were in their Klan uniforms.”

Emily straightened her mouth and looked at the wall. I asked her, “Was my grandfather in the Klan, too?”

Her face came back, and she waved her hand. “Pfshh. Did she tell you that? That wasn’t the
Klan.
It was the Women’s Klean Up Society for America. We didn’t have a chapter in Plymouth—we 120 / RENÉ STEINKE

had something else called the Queens of the Golden Mask, but it was the same thing. They had the hoods and all, but it was a group for
ladies.
It was just a way to see your friends.”

“They helped the men?”

She shook her head and looked out the window, distracted by something she saw there. “Your grandfather didn’t do anything like that. He was too weak, too nervous. Wouldn’t have known what to do with himself.” Marietta hadn’t liked Oscar, Emily’s husband, either; she said he wasn’t good enough for her. Each of them must have seen the vulnerabilities in the other’s husband, no matter how well he’d hidden them. The sun lay over Emily’s shoulder like a pale drape and lit the fuzz on her cheek. She sur-veyed a spot somewhere above my head. Suddenly that strange, familial voice was back. “How old are you now?”

“Twenty-two.”

“I had children when I was your age. You shouldn’t wait too long, honey, or you’ll regret it.”

“But I’m not married,” I said. “I don’t even have a boyfriend.”

As she nodded at me and looked away, the flesh under her chin wobbled. “That’s too bad, honey. Time’s a-marching on.”

The nurse brought in a tarnished silver tray with a teapot and clover-shaped cookies and set it on the table. “I thought you might be peckish. Emily bought these from the little Girl Scout across the street.”

“Thank you,” said Emily.

The nurse asked if I lived far from there.

“It’s a few hours away.”

“Then you should come more often.” She put her hand on Emily’s shoulder. “Right?”

“She’s a busy girl,” said Emily, pointing as if it were obvious from my looks. The nurse studied me a moment, nodded, and left the room.

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Emily wheeled herself closer to the table and poured us each a cup of tea. The teacups had delicate flowers and a thread of gold around the rims, just like Erma’s and Marietta’s, such delicate cups, and each of them had managed to keep them unchipped all the years since her wedding. I sipped at my tea and held the bird-bone-fragile handle. “Have you heard from Hanna?”

“Hanna,” she said sweetly, leaning back and smoothing the pink blanket over her legs. “She was here for my birthday. Where is she now? California?” She tapped her forehead. “Did she go on that tour? I’m trying to remember.”

I thought of Hanna in a white bulky sweater, her hair gone naturally white, walking out on the porch of her little stone house to look at the sea.

“When’s the last time she came to see you?” I asked. “Does she come often?”